Carbon Delta
by iTheDkoi
Summary: Delia Curtis's job is to break the wall between man and machine by building a government designed supercomputer with a mind of it's own. The mind however, is hers. When the presence of the allspark gives the brain clone a physical form, will two of the same person be able to exist at once? Or will the machine decide to replace her? Self harm, violence, OCXOP, angst, abduction, etc


You dudes, whazzup? Just kidding. I can't type like that very long.

Anyhoo, here's my first transfanfic. It's a slow start, sorry.

BTW, this story WILL have some slightly sensitive themes, violence, self-mutilation, etc. in later chapters that will be disturbing to some readers. If it bugs you, please don't read.

Otherwise, enjoy!

…..

What is the difference between a human and a machine?

It's not actually at all that difficult to figure out, on the surface.

Humans are living organisms, and living organisms reproduce, grow, consume, produce waste, and eventually die. Machines simply consume and produce.

But that's a human's definition of life, and humans are flawed.

After all, we only see 1% of the visible spectrum. We can hear less than that. Smell, taste, feel… All limited. We as a species can only take pride in the power of the mind, and even then our views can't be trusted to know what's real. A more modern search for knowledge has brought up a question.

Once given a situation, would a machine feel emotion?

That in itself is a much more complicated question.

After all, think of someone close to you. Now think of a total stranger.

Why is the first more special to you?

Feelings.

But the stranger has feelings too.

You have no feelings for them because they have expressed no feelings for you.

So do we feel, or do we mimic?

If someone close to you died, would you cry because you feel bad for them, or because you yourself can't see them alive and interact anymore?

So, do machines feel? Could they? Would they want to?

After all, what is emotion?

Infotech is a company built to figure that out.

The company itself was built by a wing of the government designed to provide solutions to the worst case scenarios of humanity. Plague, extinction, apocalypse, nuclear war, it has a branch for it all.

Project Pantomime was built for the fusion of the human health branch and the branch of chronological limitation.

In a nutshell, their job was to build a messenger for the survivors of the most apocalyptic situations, a time capsule with it's own built-in tour guide and leader.

A personality programmer, or a P.P for short, would be needed to write everything into a memory to design a personality for the machine. Chances were, in a situation that Pantomime, (or Mimi, for short) would be needed would also be a situation in which empathy and discretion would be needed. Anyone could hack a code, but a human being is much harder to figure out.

So, a personality would need to be there to lead and regulate. Of course, someone would need to program their life in, to write everything down into a memory.

Absolutely everything.

Because in life, we are made by what we know. The first three years or so in human development can decide personality, talent, emotional range, empathy, growth, the list goes on.

And Project Pantomime is Delia Curtis's baby.

Actually, more of a personality clone to be precise.

The theory is, if a machine has a life, and is fuelled by its own survival, it will be forced to care and become involved about what happens to the people in its life. Thus, emotion.

However, simply making up a life wouldn't work. One slip up on a keyboard, and the machine didn't get hugged enough as a baby and grows up to be an emotionless psychopath.

So, Infotech needed to get a life.

No pun intended.

And Delia could provide that.

No close friends, no close family, low on the radar, no criminal record, and degrees in computer programming, engineering, and mechanics.

In a machine, that translated pretty much into 'easily controlled, difficult to persuade, and relatively simple to manipulate' in the pre-independence stage.

All in all, a safe bet.

Of course, nobody said that out loud. Delia didn't like being the safe, convenient, predictable option.

Not that hard to understand, really.

How would you feel if someone told you that you were predictable and safe enough to be a machine's brain?

Probably not that great.

Still, Delia didn't complain. She liked her job. In a way, it was like building a baby from the ground up, minus the mess and the noise, and at triple the speed.

It was a job where once she started, nobody else could replace her. Mimi was being built by her life, her experiences. Things like that couldn't be stimulated on the fly.

Once she was in, there was a load of work to do, but there was no turning back. She couldn't stop until the project was done.

When you're building a life, you can't stop and freeze part way through.

Life is delicate.

And it can't always be controlled the way we want it to.

Delia Curtis didn't know that yet.

…...

Wow. It's been awhile since I've written on a spree like that. Sorry it's so short, it's just the opener. I hope it wasn't too dry. Once I get this sucker rolling, it's gonna be action almost every chapter. Promise. This is gonna be good. Please review if you'd like this to continue!


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